By most measures, Harrison Kim is a successful high school student. Not only does he have stellar grades, the 18-year-old senior from Sammamish, WA, also plays guitar in a high school rock band and regularly performs volunteer work. Now, he faces one of the most daunting rites [...]
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ALABAMA – Despite soaring deficits, cuts in social services, worker layoffs and tornado-devastated communities, Alabama’s first Republican-controlled government in 136 years has turned its focus on undocumented immigrants, raising questions about policymakers’ priorities. Governor Robert Bentley recently signed a tough anti-immigration law, the latest in a patchwork of similar [...]
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Idell McShan sits outside her broken trailer home, her 3-year-old great-granddaughter playing at her feet. A slight breeze kicks up, rustling leaves and sending a scrap of paper scuttling across the ground. McShan glances toward the treetops – a hint of worry crosses her face, her body tenses. Her [...]
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Keith and Elaine Davis lived simply and quietly for years in the modest house Keith’s father built in the 1950s in a low-income neighborhood of Tuscaloosa that some just call “behind the water tower.” Their home, furniture, car and pickup were destroyed by the tornado that plowed through Alabama [...]
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CALIFORNIA — Two-year-old Richard kicked a blue rubber ball inside the home he shares with his family. When he tripped on it he ran up to Maria Olvera. “Mama me cai,” he said, “Mom I fell.” But Olvera, 51, isn’t the little boy’s mother, she is his [...]
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Lack of communication technology and infrastructure slowed recovery assistance to Alabama’s most rural communities the first week after the April tornadoes. Many people didn’t hear that shelters were open, or about the need to register quickly for federal emergency aid. Few families have cellphones in the rural corners of [...]
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The tornado damage in Alabama is far more devastating than can be imagined by just seeing the images on TV and YouTube. In Tuscaloosa, full neighborhoods and communities have been obliterated as if a bomb was dropped. Two weeks after the tornado roared through the town of 90,000, bulldozers, [...]
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CHICAGO – Chicago, one of the most populous, politically important cities in the country, has watched its African-American population steadily ebb over the last decade, to the point where low-income residents say they no longer recognize this city as a stronghold of working families. The effects of public housing [...]
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ewspaper LeaJay Harper says she was a typically rebellious teenager raised by a single mother. She left home at 17 and lived on the streets, surviving on stale donated bread and sleeping on church porches. When she was 18, she was arrested for stealing a $10 bag of McDonald’s [...]
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Low-income families along the Texas border could lose millions of dollars over the next decade and see their voice in government even further diminished because, from the statistical reality of the federal government’s 2010 census, they don’t exist. The 10-year population count may have missed as many as 300,000 [...]
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Apr 17 2012
Michael Seifert | Rio Grande Valley Equal Voice Network Compañero. The word means “companion,” and is from the Latin, meaning “the one I share bread with.” A compañero, then, is someone with whom you share the bread of life—be it the bread of the day’s hopes and dreams, struggles and disappointments, or blessings and bounding happiness, which, experienced alone, remain Read more →
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